Unalaska, AK – Starting this month, the ping of a text message can alert you to important safety messages. The Unalaska Department of Public Saefty has registered with Nixle, a service that routes community notifications to a person's cell phone or e-mail account.

Public Safety will be using Nixle to send Unalaska residents messages related to four categories: alert, advisory, community, and traffic. The alerts can be used to notify community members of emergencies like tsunami warnings, volcano eruptions, or hazmat incidents. Advisories will be used to for high wind warnings or level 3 road advisories, for example. Community alerts will cover things like rabies vaccinations. Sgt. Jennifer Shockley anticipates that Nixle will primarily be used for traffic updates.

"Once we actually get our winter weather, traffic advisories will probably come out with some regularity. I would anticipate a couple of week," says Shockley. "The messages that come in both on the cell-phone and email are very short. They're text-only. Most of them are probably going to be 300 words or less."

The service is free, and non-profits can also sign up to use it. Users can customize their alerts to receive messages only from public safety, or only via email if they prefer. And user information isn't available to any of the publishers, says Shockley.

"We don't have access to any of that information," says Shockley. "If somebody's worried about, oh, the police are going to have my cell phone number, and my home address, and all of this other information' - we don't even get a list of who's subscribed. We just hope that there are going to be people out there using it as an alternative method to get public safety advisories."

Interested residents can subscribe for the service at Nixle's website.